16 Funeral bells ring

We have an author who wrote a Discourse of Bells when he was a prisoner in Turkey. What would he have written if he had been my fellow prisoner in this sick bed?

The bells in the steeple next door, just like the harmony of the spheres, never cease but are more audible.

When the Turks took Constantinople they melted the bells into cannons. I have heard both bells and ordnance, but never been so much affected as with these bells.

I have lain near a steeple in which there are said to be more than thirty bells and near another where there is one so big as that the clapper is said to weigh more than 600 pounds, yet never so affected as here.

These bells solemnize the funerals of people that I knew or of people that I knew to be my neighbour. We dwelt in houses near to one another before but now they are gone into that house into which I must follow.

There is a way of punishing the children of great persons. Other children are punished on their behalf and in their names. This works on those who indeed had more deserved it.

When these bells tell me that now one, now another is buried, must not I acknowledge that they have received the punishment due to me and paid the debt that I owe?

There is a story of a bell in a monastery which, when anyone in the house was sick to death, rang by itself so they knew the inevitableness of the danger. Once it rang when nobody was sick, but the next day one of the monks fell from the steeple and died and the bell kept its reputation as a prophet.

If these funeral bells were ringing now even if nobody has died, may not I, by the hour of the funeral, be the one who needs it?

When we hear of some man’s promotion we think that we might very well have been that man. Why might not I have been that man that is carried to his grave now?

Could I fit myself to stand or sit in any mans place and not lie in any mans grave?

They may have acquired better abilities than I but I was born to as many infirmities as they.

Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university and gone a great way in a little time by a vehement fever.

Whoever these bells bring to the ground today, if he and I had been compared yesterday perchance I should have been thought likelier to come to this preferment than he.

God has kept the power of death in his own hands lest any man should bribe death.

If man knew the gain of death, the ease of death, he would provoke death to assist him by any hand which he might use.

When men see many of their own professions promoted it encourages a hope of promotion for themselves.

So when these hourly bells tell me of so many funerals of men like me it presents a comfort whensoever mine shall come.